


and at midnight, a candle next to the wine

by homsantoft (tofsla)



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: First Kisses, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-31
Updated: 2016-07-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 11:41:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7638844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/pseuds/homsantoft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>I've no mood for company tonight, Dorian said. Unless it's you, I suppose. Playing at grudging concession, but smiling. There was some kind of promise to it, one of those offers that's so convoluted it takes a whole night to untangle.</em>
</p><p>Two stories about kisses in the past tense, and one in the present.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and at midnight, a candle next to the wine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [taispeantas_laethuil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/taispeantas_laethuil/gifts).



> Long overdue prompt ficlet: "first kisses," for taispeantas_laethuil

Everything was strange, in those days. Strange words in strange languages sat heavy on the tongue. In a village market outside Antiva City Hissrad brought bread, chewy and sour, and olives, bitter and oily, the taste lingering. The scent of flowering vines and bushes whose names he did not know, spreading in the evening air.

The trunks of old trees twisted, their canopies sparse and low. They dotted the village, hid behind its ruddy walls. Stood scattered beyond it, the ground bare between them. Beyond, scrub faded into something like desert. So many open spaces, room to see someone coming but also room to be seen. The Fog Warriors loved places like this, places where their enemies wouldn't be able to glimpse a single thing through their smoke to orient themselves.

He watched the doorways for moving shadows. A young man by a market stall watched him. No sign of a weapon. If he went for a hidden knife, there was time to react.

"You aren't from around here," an old person, a man, said. 

Hissrad shook his head, mute, irrationally afraid to give himself away by his accent. There were Tal-Vashoth here as well as Vashoth; what difference did it make, to a person like this?

"Don't see many Vashoth alone," the man said. "You all stick together. What's your name?"

"The Iron Bull," Hissrad lied.

"Defected from Rivain, I suppose," the man said. His hands were worn, the fingers angled unevenly—a failure of the bone. On Par Vollen they would have set the joints in place with rings, like splinting a leg. His Tama wore them, last time he saw her. Not a cure, but a solution.

Hissrad shrugged.

"You want work."

"Maybe."

He had work, eventually; had a Viddathari contact in a mercenary company working around a place that he'd mostly heard called the Marches when Antivans talked about it. But you will travel South alone, they told him. 

You will learn how to convince.

"Mirian might have something," the man said. "She sees to the harvest. Always things to lift and carry."

How did roles work there? A woman was a person who did administrative or domestic work, but she did these things because she was a woman. She was not a woman because she did these things. Or was that wrong?

Mirian was not an administrator; she did not sit in the shade like the city ladies he had played bodyguard to the week before; did not see to the accounts. She was dark from work in the sun, hauled baskets and shouted orders. He thought of sailors when he saw her. A wiry woman from Rivain who worked on the ship he brought passage on, across the Rialto bay from Afsaana. 

He did indeed lift and carry, not to be trusted with the process of cleaning and treating the olives for fermentation.

A long evening in the waning sun, his skin growing dry. A chafing heat, not like the familiarly humid air of the jungle. A long day, after.

In the afternoon the workers lay down their tools and retreated to the shade, and Mirian led him into the kitchen of a thick-walled house, the cool darkness a blinding shock that sent him into a panic, an ambush, an enemy unseen—

But there was nobody there but her brother, offering red wine from a green bottle, bubbles threaded through the uneven glass.

"We sleep in the afternoons," her brother said. Theodor. Looked Hissrad up and down with an interested smile that Hissrad had observed between others but had not considered in relation to himself. "Too warm to work, yes? If you need a room, mine is at your disposal."

Hissrad considered the proposition, and found, to his surprise, that it didn't displease him. Learn to pass, they had said, and this was a thing that many people did; and he'd always needed to fuck, needed the Tamassrans to take him out of his head. So here it was, in another form: a thing that could be a tool, although there was no strategic gain to be made from that instance in particular. 

Call it practice.

"Sure," Hissrad said. "Thanks."

Gasped breaths in a shuttered room, bright hangings made dull in the half-light.

"Are you always this careful?" Theodor asked, laughing.

"Hey," Hissrad said, looking for his mistake, "you want something else?"

"No," Theodor said. "Just not what I was expecting."

"Not savage enough for you, huh," Hissrad said.

And for answer, was kissed.

He faltered at that, surprised, so that for a moment it was just the stilted press of lips, their dicks dragging together as Theodor arched beneath him. A scramble to respond in time, to catch Theodor's mouth as he pulled away.

Worth it for the amusement, for Theodor's laughter again, breathy against Hissrad's open mouth.

Unfamiliar, the heat of it, the taste of another person in his mouth; strange, this too, even through the aftertaste of wine. To be undirected, presented with a baffling array of options. Theodor gave power over easily, seemed to want to be relieved of it, and so Hissrad did his best to oblige.

"Don't usually do that, huh?" Theodor asked, after. "Kissing, I mean."

Hissrad scratched the back of his neck. "Don't usually fuck people I only just met, either," he said.

"Maybe you should," Theodor said. "Wasn't it fun? You were very good."

Hissrad ached strangely, somewhere in his chest. A loss and a gain. He felt weird, off balance. He felt far from home, a stranger to himself.

"Hey, glad you approve," he said, grinning.

 

 

"Really?" Dorian asks. "You didn't kiss people?"

They sit in a secluded corner of the maze-like gardens, Skyhold quiet around them. The high fortress walls turn the star-strewn sky to a distant square of light. 

I've no mood for company tonight, Dorian said. Unless it's you, I suppose. Playing at grudging concession, but smiling. There was some kind of promise to it, one of those offers that's so convoluted it takes a whole night to untangle.

Water and wine. 

"Nah," the Bull said. "Didn't need to. Did plenty of other stuff with my mouth, though."

"Of course you did," Dorian says, exasperated.

He needed a lot, sometimes, back then, on Seheron. To be taken apart, stripped down. Handled roughly, his face pressed between a Tamassran's legs as another fucked him, the straps of the harness she wore digging into his thighs.

Not kissing. Maybe the Tamassrans didn't do that. Maybe they just didn't do that for him.

Maybe they knew he'd like it too much, way beyond the limits of need.

Dorian, who complains of the cold, seems warm enough now; leans bare-armed against the Iron Bull's side, stretches his legs out before him. It's summer in the mountains, the snow receding, and Skyhold is always warmer than its surroundings.

They're something, him and Dorian. Something he doesn't really know. Something he keeps seeking out, tugging at. Tries to find words for, and struggles.

Dorian's exasperated by that too, but he was more exasperated when the Bull offered to back off.

I simply—I don't want you to think that I'm only interested in some sort of stereotype of Qunari brutality.

He's a good guy, Dorian. Sees where he's fucked up. That's worth a lot.

"Pretty sure this was a story for a story," the Iron Bull says, and fills their cups.

 

 

He wasn't afraid, back then. He didn't know that there was anything to be afraid of.

"Dorian," his father said, in tones of censure, "you really must learn to restrain yourself. To be honest, we're running out of Circles to send you to. This behaviour is beneath you."

"At least I win the fights," Dorian said, laughing.

He was seventeen, soon to turn eighteen, and he knew that he was important; knew, also, that he was powerful.

Dust motes danced in the sunlight that streamed through the high windows of the parlour.

Halward held his hands clasped behind his back—a gesture that straightened his shoulders and made him stand tall, almost as tall as Dorian. It also kept him from revealing any telling twitches of his fingers, which were one of the surest signs that Dorian was getting to him.

"Well, yes," his father said, sour. "That _is_ something. But nonetheless."

And so it was another school. The last school, in fact. Minrathous, that time; pleasingly far from home. Not particularly pleasing in any other respect.

Prayer in the mornings, sitting on the hard benches of the Chantry. Canticle of Benedictions. Dorian didn't move his lips, but looked sidelong down the row of students, sizing them up. A timid-looking girl, pale, her shoulders hunched. Another girl beside her, broad-shouldered, chin raised.

A boy, eyes closed. An angular, strong nose, and sharp cheekbones. Skin of a tone with Dorian's own, but body broader.

Dorian lingered there for long enough to earn a cuff to the back of his head from a passing Brother. Lingered there day after day, but with a little more care.

He still wasn't afraid. He was a Pavus.

They fought, of course, Dorian and beautiful Ceas. Bitter and bloody, although not in the usual way of Tevinter. Fought in the atrium under the fading autumn trees, a fist to the face when a staff was lost, a burst of fire that singed the leaves as it was recovered.

"You're not all you think you are, Pavus," Ceas said, a hand heavy on Dorian's shoulder, pinning it painfully to the flagstones. He knelt above Dorian, their faces close, legs tangled. Too like the other thing, the imagined thing, the thing that he wasn't afraid of but didn't feel like sharing.

With his head tipped back against the ground, he could see they had an audience, students only—but the Brothers and Sisters wouldn't be long.

Ceas' breath was hot against Dorian's neck.

"Oh, really?" Dorian asked, grinning; sent him flying with magic alone.

Confinement, for that; but Dorian was excellent at confinement, by then. Excellent at infuriating his tutors into carelessness, excellent at making the business more trouble than it was strictly worth. No reprieve to be had, but entertainment, certainly.

They did not, as far as he could tell, write to his father.

Possibly his tuition fee was more valuable to them than his compliance. Rebelliousness could be punished; money was money, and the Pavus name on their books nothing to sniff at besides.

Fighting and fighting. Tumbling in the dormitory hall at the limits of their power, the hour late, the night dark and overcast. Lanterns extinguished.

"Getting tired, Ceas?" Dorian asked, voice low, tangling magic like barbed vines around his legs and yanking him off balance. But Ceas' hand was hard on Dorian's arm as he fell, and so they tangled together again.

"You little shit," Ceas said, breathless. Hand on the back of Dorian's neck.

So Dorian kissed him, unafraid.

Teeth and tongue. Ceas' hands fell to fist in his nightshirt, holding him close.

Pushing him away, although not until some time later.

 

 

"So," the Bull says, "I guess now I know why you thought Cassandra and Varric wanted to fuck."

"You're laughing at me," Dorian says. "Oh, very well, I'm a terrible joke. Yes, yes, you have me."

Of course the Bull has guessed these things about him. Fall for a spy, like a fool. How much of him the Bull must have seen through already. 

"You ever kiss someone you didn't kind of hate?" the Bull asks.

"Oh, yes," Dorian says. "At least once. I live in hope that I may again. Maker, I'm not sure I'm drunk enough for this level of confession after all."

"We can keep working on it," the Bull says.

That thrilling heat spreading downward from his chest that he knows well enough as infatuation.

"The drunkenness, or the kissing?"

The Bull's throat works as he swallows.

Perhaps— 

Perhaps— 

"Hey," the Bull says, and his voice is so low, barely breaks the night stillness. "You saying you don't hate me?"

Oh, how Dorian wants him.

"I might not find you entirely intolerable," he says, affected, like the heroine of one of Cassandra's books.

It gets him a laugh, and that's a hot thing too, a thrilling thing.

"Come here, then," the Bull says. "If you like."

To begin the thing with a kiss.

How novel.

Dorian goes to him.


End file.
